People, Not Protocols: The Heart of ACT
This post was written by ACBS GA member Jessica Goodnight, PhD, of the Anxiety and Trauma Clinic of Atlanta.
If you've spent enough time in the ACT community, you've likely heard the classic scripts. You know what it means to allow your thoughts to be "leaves on a stream". You know what a "passenger on the bus" is. You might have thanked your mind for a thought, or stared into a strangers eyes for ages without blinking, or said the word "milk" so many times you forgot where you were in space and time.
Yes, ACT has its lingo, its scripts, its go-to exercises. And in all the jargon and the community-specific language, a truth about ACT is easy to miss.
Read these scripts verbatim to a client, and you've almost certainly stopped doing ACT.
When you care for a plant, do you follow every direction, step by step, in your gardening handbook? Or are you responding to what you notice about the plant?
When you soothe a friend's hurt feelings, are you following an exact script you read in a social skills book? Or are you responding to what you notice about your friend?
Have you ever successfully reached a client in the depths of their pain by reading them a script, word for word? How would you like to be on the other side of that interaction?
You may have seen Magritte's famous painting before - a pipe, just above the words Ceci n'est pas une pipe: This is not a pipe.
If you've never seen this before, you might be scratching your head, so let me explain what Magritte was getting at. Yes, he painted a pipe - but in reality, this painting is not a pipe. It’s canvas and paint arranged to look like one. You can’t stuff tobacco into it, light it, or smoke it. It has the visual form of a pipe, but none of the function.
As humans, we spent so much time inside of language, it's easy to forget that words and symbols are not the same as the things we touch, taste, and see. It's like spending so much time looking at a map while we're hiking, we forget to notice the sky above us and the earth under our feet. The entire point of ACT is to break free of symbolic rigidity and learn to be here now.
It's tragically ironic, to me, that some providers are taught ACT as a script to follow. A perfectly rehearsed metaphor, delivered on cue, is not psychological flexibility -- it is merely a drawing of it. Imagine a client coming to you in the depths of their pain, desperate for a soft place to land, and you hand them a sketch of a supportive chair.
It has the visual form they asked for, but none of the function.
Strip away the academic jargon, and the underlying philosophy of ACT (functional contextualism) asks a single practical question: Is what you are doing right now actually helping this specific human move toward a workable, meaningful life in this exact moment? Teach one client to let their thoughts be leaves on a stream, and a world of possibilities opens up. Teach another client the same thing, and all growth shuts off as they try to get the exercise "right."
Function is everything. Form is secondary. This is why the real ones inside the ACT community stay out of professional infighting and don't gatekeep the work, never demanding allegiance to a specific set of proprietary techniques. They practice ACT as an open-source framework, not a rigid toolkit of clever exercises.
You might think of ACT like a specific kind of lens you can look through to see the world. It has this very cool ability to zoom in to the micro-moments of human interaction, like a microscope, while also being able to zoom all the way out to the arc of history and context, like a telescope. An authentic, clinically responsive technique that is not traditional "ACTy" in its form will often function much more like ACT than a therapist following a protocol to the letter.
When you view therapy through this process-oriented lens, the boundaries between modalities begin to dissolve. You stop worrying about whether you are being a "real" ACT therapist, and you start responding to the human being in front of you using whatever tool best serves their psychological flexibility in that moment.
If you want to really know ACT, the jargon is the last place to look. Really knowing ACT is about learning to:
Make space for the full range of your emotional experience (acceptance)
Maintain ongoing curiosity about the ways you are probably wrong (defusion)
Step into the here-and-now, five-senses experience of living (contact with the present moment)
Stop taking yourself so seriously (self as context)
Get familiar with what truly matters to you in life, beyond all you've been told (values)
Develop the grit to do what you care about in this life, to the extent you are able, one step at a time (committed action)
And no, none of us do that perfectly. Not one. But if this is the road you're on, welcome, fellow traveler. I think you might be an ACT therapist after all.
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